I have always been extremely interested in the peculiar dichotomy of terror.
Not horror, even though it’s tough to tell them apart. Horror carries the potential for shock and disgust, but terror is just a feeling of lingering dread. It deals far more with ambiguity, finding a home directly in the middle of the Uncanny Valley rather than explicit fear and aversion. It beckons you in. Yes, something is very wrong here, but there’s something familiar about it too. While “horrible” and “horrific” mean almost the same thing, “terrible” and “terrific” come from different molds entirely.
It might be a threat, or it might not. We don’t know yet. That’s ambiguity, and it’s not something human beings are good at handling. Not that you can blame us. It creates dissonance, something we find very uncomfortable. “This is normal” and “this is threatening” at the exact same time. What’s interesting to me is the overlap between how we navigate Terror and how we navigate other inherent contradictions in our lives and our values.
When we are confronted with two opposing theoretical principals, in the realm of thought beyond direct external support or evidence, I think we have the exact same mechanism and reaction and feelings as when we are confronted with things that inspire Terror in us. And I think the coping mechanism is the same.
In the realm of ambiguity, via “the God of the gaps,” we cling to the “familiar/known,” and run screaming from the contradictory part that we don’t understand on a deeper level. If the familiar is more compelling than the unfamiliar, our brains will write scripts to manage and detach and explain away the later on whatever macro level immediately supersedes the context- to preserve and defend the familiar aspects of the concept. If the unfamiliar part is more overwhelming and more compelling as a fear, we will write mental scripts on why the familiar parts of the concept is wrong/harmful/terrifying, again in whatever macro level of thought immediately supersedes the situation, to identify the theory or concept as a negative one- either not worth attention, or worth attention for purposes of eradication.
This is how two people can be presented with the exact same contradiction and evidence thereof, and pick one side or the other of it to defend. Unconsciously, beyond the realm of objective thought, there is a subjective familiarity check happening that we don’t realize. And since familiarity is neither good nor bad necessarily, a wide disparity of theoretical moral outcomes can be produced from the same sets of distributed data.
Here’s a couple different moral systems, neither of which I personally ascribe to, as examples:
Christians believe that there is a benevolent God despite the contradiction that the world is a horror show that punishes the least deserving of it. “Benevolent God” and “Reality” are contradictory, inherently. If Christianity is more familiar to you than atheism, you might feel compelled to address this cognitive dissonance by brain-fabricating some nonsense about how “the lord works in mysterious ways” or that “God has a plan that maybe includes some suffering, but in the end it will totally be worth it because trust us bro.”
Postmodernists believe that there is an entire system they call The Patriarchy created by men to establish dominance over women and benefit men, despite the contradiction that men suffer the same or worse throughout life than women, in different ways. If postmodernist theories in general are more familiar to you than just being apolitical, you might feel compelled to address this cognitive dissonance by brain-fabricating some nonsense about how “the Patriarchy hurts men too” as though it doesn’t completely defeat the entire premise of a system being consciously and deliberately created for mens benefit. I guess the only distinction was their intention, they intended to make it benefit themselves. Who is they? Who knows.
I think we generate our religious belief systems with this mechanism for ambiguity, largely based off of our own familiarity. Which is why a lot of people end up following the exact same paths as their parents on that front. It’s not so much to defend their parents, it’s just the overlap in familiarity influencing what direction we take contradictions.
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